Why Bush Censored Discovery of Chemical Weapons in Iraq

A new report says the Bush administration concealed the discovery of chemical weapons in Iraq that had been developed with U.S. support in the 1980s — and then denied medical care to the wounded American soldiers involved. According to The New York Times, U.S. troops secretly reported finding more than 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or bombs after the 2003 invasion. All of the chemical weaponry predated 1991, just one year after Saddam Hussein stopped being a U.S. ally and recipient of the Western military aid that helped build his arsenal. At least 17 American and six Iraqi troops were wounded in their handling of the munitions in six separate incidents between 2004 and 2011. The weapons’ existence was kept from the troops entering those areas, and officials denied the victims the care they needed. One soldier talked about his health problems as a result of chemical exposure.

Andrew Goldman: “I still have residual blisters every now and then. I still have a lot of trouble breathing. I have a constant headache. I haven’t not had a headache since 2008 … Only thing I can think of is politics. Doesn’t jive with the story they wanted.”

In addition to raising new questions about the neglect of soldiers’ health and the Bush administration’s false pretext for going to war, the disclosure also carries implications for Iraq’s ongoing crisis. The Islamic State now controls most of the territory where the chemical weapons were found.

“In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies…”

As reported by RT and others, the chemical weapons, etc., that the US provided Saddam Hussein:

…may now be in the hands of Islamic State militants [who now control the very areas where the weapons were found].

People are acting like this is all new information, but it is absolutely not.

Anyone who wanted to know could have known, starting in the early 1980s, that the USA was (completely openly, not even covertly) providing Saddam with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons components, as well as diplomatic and political support, since the USA was one of the members of the Axis of Evil that was waging a war of aggression and genocide against Iran and the Kurds, killing over a million (in addition to 500,000 young Iraqis, mainly conscripts).

In 1982, the USA took Saddam off its “terrorist” list (leaving Nelson Mandela on until 2007) so the USA could join in Saddam’s Axis for the invasion and genocide (the USA also committed genocide against the Kurds in Turkey, under Bill Clinton.)

Here, for example, is Noam Chomsky in 2006, giving what today is being reported as “new” information:

Bush administration policies have, again, consciously been carried out in a way, which they know is likely to increase the threat of terror. The most obvious example is the Iraq invasion. That was undertaken with the anticipation that it would be very likely to increase the threat of terror and also nuclear proliferation. And, in fact, that’s exactly what happened, according to the judgment of the C.I.A., National Intelligence Council, foreign intelligence agencies, independent specialists. They all point out that, yes, as anticipated, it increased the threat of terror. In fact, it did so in ways well beyond what was anticipated.

To mention just one, we commonly read that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Well, it’s not totally accurate. There were means to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [provided by the USA] and known to be in Iraq. They were under guard by U.N. inspectors, who were dismantling them. When Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest sent in their troops, they neglected to instruct them to guard these sites. The U.N. inspectors were expelled, the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors continued their work by satellite and reported that over a hundred sites had been looted, in fact, systematically looted, not just somebody walking in, but careful looting. That included dangerous biotoxins, means to hide precision equipment to be used to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, means to develop chemical weapons and so on. All of this has disappeared. One hates to imagine where it’s disappeared to, but it could end up in New York.

Here is Chomsky in 2008 talking about how the US supported Saddam, including providing him with chemical weapons, etc.

Here is Chomsky in 2002 talking about how in the ’80s he was strongly opposing the USA’s noble mission to ensure Saddam could gas Iran and the Kurds.

Neither Iraq having US-provided WMD or US soldiers being injured by them and denied care by all-loving, all-benevolent US leaders (who always have the best interests of the world in their hearts) is news:

U.S. companies sold Iraq the ingredients for a witch’s brew

The United States almost went to war against Iraq in February because of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program. In his State of the Union address, President Clinton castigated Hussein for “developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.”

“You cannot defy the will of the world,” the President proclaimed. “You have used weapons of mass destruction before. We are determined to deny you the capacity to use them again.”

Most Americans listening to the President did not know that the United States supplied Iraq with much of the raw material for creating a chemical and biological warfare program. Nor did the media report that U.S. companies sold Iraq more than $1 billion worth of the components needed to build nuclear weapons and diverse types of missiles, including the infamous Scud.

When Iraq engaged in chemical and biological warfare in the 1980s, barely a peep of moral outrage could be heard from Washington, as it kept supplying Saddam with the materials he needed to build weapons.

…

According to a 1994 Senate report, private American suppliers, licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, exported a witch’s brew of biological and chemical materials to Iraq from 1985 through 1989. Among the biological materials, which often produce slow, agonizing death, were:

Also on the list: Escherichia coli (E. coli), genetic materials, human and bacterial DNA, and dozens of other pathogenic biological agents. “These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction,” the Senate report stated. “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”

The report noted further that U.S. exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical-warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare production facilities, and chemical-warhead filling equipment.

…

The American company that provided the most biological materials to Iraq in the 1980s was American Type Culture Collection of Maryland and Virginia, which made seventy shipments of the anthrax-causing germ and other pathogenic agents, according to a 1996 Newsday story.

Other American companies also provided Iraq with the chemical or biological compounds, or the facilities and equipment used to create the compounds for chemical and biological warfare. Among these suppliers were the following:

* Alcolac International, a Baltimore chemical manufacturer already linked to the illegal shipment of chemicals to Iran, shipped large quantities of thiodiglycol (used to make mustard gas) as well as other chemical and biological ingredients, according to a 1989 story in The New York Times.

* Nu Kraft Mercantile Corp. of Brooklyn (affiliated with the United Steel and Strip Corporation) also supplied Iraq with huge amounts of thiodiglycol, the Times reported.

* Celery Corp., Charlotte, NC

* Matrix-Churchill Corp., Cleveland, OH (regarded as a front for the Iraqi government, according to Representative Henry Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, who quoted U.S. intelligence documents to this effect in a 1992 speech on the House floor).

The following companies were also named as chemical and biological materials suppliers in the 1992 Senate hearings on “United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait”:

* Mouse Master, Lilburn, GA

* Sullaire Corp., Charlotte, NC

* Pure Aire, Charlotte, NC

* Posi Seal, Inc., N. Stonington, CT

* Union Carbide, Danbury, CT

* Evapco, Taneytown, MD

* Gorman-Rupp, Mansfield, OH

Additionally, several other companies were sued in connection with their activities providing Iraq with chemical or biological supplies: subsidiaries or branches of Fisher Controls International, Inc., St. Louis; Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., Princeton, NJ; Bechtel Group, Inc., San Francisco; and Lummus Crest, Inc., Bloomfield, NJ, which built one chemical plant in Iraq and, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, was building an ethylene facility. Ethylene is a necessary ingredient for thiodiglycol.

In 1994, a group of twenty-six veterans, suffering from what has come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome, filed a billion-dollar lawsuit in Houston against Fisher, Rhone-Poulenc, Bechtel Group, and Lummus Crest, as well as American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) and six other firms, for helping Iraq to obtain or produce the compounds which the veterans blamed for their illnesses. By 1998, the number of plaintiffs has risen to more than 4,000 and the suit is still pending in Texas.

A Pentagon study in 1994 dismissed links between chemical and biological weapons and Gulf War Syndrome. Newsday later disclosed, however, that the man who headed the study, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, was a director of ATCC. Moreover, at the time of ATCC’s shipments to Iraq, which the Commerce Department approved, the firm’s CEO was a member of the Commerce Department’s Technical Advisory Committee, the paper found.

A larger number of American firms supplied Iraq with the specialized computers, lasers, testing and analyzing equipment, and other instruments and hardware vital to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, missiles, and delivery systems. Computers, in particular, play a key role in nuclear weapons development. Advanced computers make it feasible to avoid carrying out nuclear test explosions, thus preserving the program’s secrecy. The 1992 Senate hearings implicated the following firms:

Some of the companies said later that they had no idea Iraq might ever put their products to military use. A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said the company believed that the Iraqi recipient of its shipments, Saad 16, was an institution of higher learning. In fact, in 1990 The Wall Street Journal described Saad 16 as “a heavily fortified, state-of-the-art complex for aircraft construction, missile design, and, almost certainly, nuclear-weapons research.”

Other corporations recognized the military potential of their goods but considered it the government’s job to worry about it. “Every once in a while you kind of wonder when you sell something to a certain country,” said Robert Finney, president of Electronic Associates, Inc., which supplied Saad 16 with a powerful computer that could be used for missile testing and development. “But it’s not up to us to make foreign policy,” Finney told The Wall Street Journal.

In 1982, the Reagan Administration took Iraq off its list of countries alleged to sponsor terrorism, making it eligible to receive high-tech items generally denied to those on the list. Conventional military sales began in December of that year. Representative Samuel Gejdenson, Democrat of Connecticut, chairman of a House subcommittee investigating “United States Exports of Sensitive Technology to Iraq,” stated in 1991:

“From 1985 to 1990, the United States Government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application. [Only thirty-nine applications were rejected.] The United States spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted. . . . The Administration has never acknowledged that it took this course of action, nor has it explained why it did so. In reviewing documents and press accounts, and interviewing knowledgeable sources, it becomes clear that United States export-control policy was directed by U.S. foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was U.S. foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Subsequently, Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, investigated the Department of Energy concerning an unheeded 1989 warning about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. In 1992, he accused the DOE of punishing employees who raised the alarm and rewarding those who didn’t take it seriously. One DOE scientist, interviewed by Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee, was especially conscientious about the mission of the nuclear non-proliferation program. For his efforts, he received very little cooperation, inadequate staff, and was finally forced to quit in frustration. “It was impossible to do a good job,” said William Emel. His immediate manager, who tried to get the proliferation program fully staffed, was chastened by management and removed from his position. Emel was hounded by the DOE at his new job as well.

Another Senate committee, investigating “United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait,” heard testimony in 1992 that Commerce Department personnel “changed information on sixty-eight licenses; that references to military end uses were deleted and the designation ‘military truck’ was changed. This was done on licenses having a total value of over $1 billion.” Testimony made clear that the White House was “involved” in “a deliberate effort . . . to alter these documents and mislead the Congress.”

American foreign-policy makers maintained a cooperative relationship with U.S. corporate interests in the region. In 1985, Marshall Wiley, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, set up the Washington-based U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, which lobbied in Washington on behalf of Iraq to promote U.S. trade with that country. Speaking of the Forum’s creation, Wiley later explained, “I went to the State Department and told them what I was planning to do, and they said, ‘Fine. It sounds like a good idea.’ It was our policy to increase exports to Iraq.“

Though the government readily approved most sales to Iraq, officials at Defense and Commerce clashed over some of them (with the State Department and the White House backing Commerce).

“If an item was in dispute, my attitude was if they were readily available from other markets, I didn’t see why we should deprive American markets,” explained Richard Murphy in 1990. Murphy was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1983 to 1989.

As it turned out, Iraq did not use any chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces in the Gulf War. But American planes bombed chemical and biological weapons storage facilities with abandon, potentially dooming tens of thousands of American soldiers to lives of prolonged and permanent agony, and an unknown number of Iraqis to a similar fate. Among the symptoms reported by the affected soldiers are memory loss, scarred lungs, chronic fatigue, severe headache, raspy voice, and passing out. The Pentagon estimates that nearly 100,000 American soldiers were exposed to sarin gas alone.

After the war, White House and Defense Department officials tried their best to deny that Gulf War Syndrome had anything to do with the bombings.The suffering of soldiers was not their overriding concern. The top concerns of the Bush and Clinton Administrations were to protect perceived U.S. interests in the Middle East, and to ensure that American corporations still had healthy balance sheets.

What are US “interests” in the Middle East? Blum, in the same article, quotes Chomsky:

“It’s been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price.”

Not one US official who participated in the Axis of Evil genocide against Iran and the Kurds has been prosecuted or jailed. Instead, Obama is protecting them, and has even hired at least one Bush Jr. era torturer into his regime (and Obama is himself, of course, a torturer).

However, one Dutch businessman, Frans van Anraat, who also provided Saddam with chemicals, etc., was jailed for 17 years for War Crimes, illustrating that trying American-monster counterparts of Anraat is, technically, possible. At the very least, Anraat’s arrest confirms that we can, and should, disassociate ourselves from and boycott the heinous US corporate government.

Iraq having US and European weapons did not make an invasion legal in any way, which is why the highest authority in the UN stated that the invasion was illegal. Do US chemical weapons and other WMD stockpiles, the world’s biggest, or the fact that the US has used them more than any other country, or the fact that the US was an accomplice in Saddam’s worst crimes, mean other countries can invade the US?

Robert, the time and effort you must have spent to deliver this organized and well presented piece – no words. thank you. most excellent job here. so many critical details you’ve included that help to shape the whole agenda.

THIS is journalism folks! don’t be a another MSM pawn. dig, find, expose. rinse, repeat!

Evelyn Connaway

Max – I have been doing this for years, used tons of paper to print out the many treasonous things the US and those who comply with their wishes has been involved in over the years! Strictly due to many power hungry greedy men and corporations who want to take over, not only the Middle East and especially Iraq’s oil producing country, but the whole world if they can! I hate that so many people to not pay attention to what is going on in our world, and some do not seem to care. When I think of all the people that have actually been murdered, by men who claim to be American’s, who became rich from the profits of war, I really wish them all the bad things that could happen to them! But they all seem to live a luxurious life style off of their ill gotten riches.

Rehmat

Because the 5,000 chemical weapons found by the US occupation forces and US-trained Iraqi forces, were the one supplied by the US, Britain and Germany to help Saddam’s anti-Islam Ba’athist army to destroy Islamic Revolution in Iran during 1980s.

Once Saddam, a CIA-MI6 agent failed to do his job, he was pronounced a threat to Israel and the US interests in the region.

Actually, the United States did not care that Iran’s revolution was Islamic. The USA had since 1953 been helping the Shah repress attempts at a secular revolution, which is why the Iranian revolution ended up being Islamic; the secularist democrats in Iran were viciously defeated by the USA and its puppet King.

At the same time as the USA was slaughtering Iranians with Saddam in the 80s, the USA was helping the Mujahedeen to conquer and overrun Afghanistan. The USA was also supporting any number of other Islamic theocratic dictatorships, including the world’s most extreme one, Saudi Arabia, which the USA has supported since the 1920s or 30s (forget which right now), and most strongly supported under Obama when he sent Saudi Arabia the biggest weapons shipment in US history in 2013. That’s just a small taste of the USA’s support for Islamic fundamentalism. Most of the countries the USA works to overthrow in the Middle East are the secular or more secular ones.

The only thing the USA opposes about Iran is independence. If Iran agreed to cede control of its resources and space to the USA, it wouldn’t matter what they did. This goes across the board for the US empire, and every empire in history, really.

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